I used my validation tool to validate itself — here's the full experiment
I'm building Buildworthy — a tool that helps SaaS founders validate their ideas before building them.
The irony hit me immediately. I needed to validate a validation tool.
So I ran the exact process Buildworthy will take founders through.
Step 1 — Identify the riskiest assumption
Not "can I build this?" Not "is the market big enough?"
The riskiest assumption: will founders pay for a structured validation tool before they have revenue?
Step 2 — Design the experiment
I didn't build anything. I posted about the problem — not the product — on Threads for three weeks. Pure pain content. No pitches, no links, no CTAs.
Posts like:
"How many of you have built something nobody wanted?"
"I'd rather kill an idea in two weeks than a product in six months"
"Most validation tools tell you if people are interested. None of them tell you if they'll pay."
Step 3 — Track the results
Week 1: 31,433 views, 510 replies, 18 new followers
Week 2: 18,000 views, 192 replies, 8 new followers
Most resonant quote received: "The amount of time I've wasted building stuff nobody wanted is embarrassing — validation is the most underrated step"
7 founders in a single thread confirmed they'd personally built something nobody wanted
Step 4 — The verdict
The pain is real. The language is clear. The market exists.
Green light to build.
Where I am now
Waitlist is live at getbuildworthy.app. Currently at 5 signups with a target of 100 in 30 days. Pre-orders open at £149 lifetime and £29/month Builder pre-order.
I'm sharing everything publicly — the numbers, the experiments, the customer calls, the failures.
Happy to answer any questions. And genuinely curious — has anyone else here used their own product's methodology to validate the product itself?
Founder of Buildworthy — building in public
Hey Sankara — saw your post about testing Buildworthy on itself and the waitlist still being small. That's the exact gap most validation tools hit — people sign up but won't say yes to paying yet. What's been the biggest blocker in converting waitlist to paid so far?
Hey Rohan, I found that the biggest blocker was that it wasn't very clear what Buildworthy was, so I had to make the decision to either get clearer on it, pivot, or kill the idea - and I chose the last option.
That makes sense. The clarity issue is actually really interesting — especially because you had to make a build/pivot/kill decision around it.
What part of Buildworthy was hardest to explain clearly: what it does, who it’s for, or why someone would use it?
I’m asking because I’m working on a framework around validating SaaS ideas before investing too much into them, and your experience is exactly the kind of real-world feedback I’m trying to learn from.
A
Alll the above
Got it — that’s really helpful.
So it sounds like the main issue was not just building the product, but having enough clarity and validation around the idea to confidently decide whether to keep building, pivot, or kill it.
That’s exactly the kind of decision TAQBAF is designed to help with.
If you were evaluating Buildworthy again today, what would you have wanted to know before deciding whether to build it?
As much as 0possible.
That makes sense. If you could go back before building Buildworthy, what are the top 3 things you would have wanted to validate first?
For example:
Or something else?
This is a strong experiment, but I’d separate “pain validation” from “purchase-path validation.”
The Threads numbers prove founders relate to the pain. The real test now is whether the same people move from “I wasted time building the wrong thing” to “I’ll pay £149 or £29/month before seeing the tool.”
The next risk is not market existence. It is conversion from pain content to preorder intent.
I’d probably test one narrow message next: not “validate your SaaS idea,” but “kill or confirm your idea before you spend the next 6 weeks building it.”
That frames Buildworthy around avoided wasted work, not validation as a nice-to-have.
Happy to put together a tighter waitlist-to-preorder angle if useful.
Hey Aryan, thanks for your comment! I think you have the right idea that there are different types of validation; I'm doing them one at a time, and my current landing page for Buildworthy is the experiment for purchase-path validation! Have you seen it by the way? What do you think about it?
I haven’t gone through the page properly yet.
And honestly, for a preorder test I would not want to give a quick surface take because the small wording/order decisions matter a lot here.
The main question I’d look at is whether the page makes people feel the cost of building the wrong thing before it asks them to pay, or whether it still feels like a useful validation tool.
That difference can change preorder intent quite a bit.
If useful, send me your email and I’ll write the tighter landing page/preorder angle properly instead of crowding the thread.
Reach out on LinkedIn if you can, and let's have a chat!
Sure, connect with me here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aryan-y-0163b0278/
Written is better for this because the useful part is making the preorder-page decision clearly, not doing a loose chat.